Kenneth Anger – 1965 – USA
Underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger was lucky enough to get a $10,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to make his proposed film about American youth car culture in the early 60s. Instead, he used most of the money to pay debts and spent what was left on this three-minute short, which no doubt raised a few eyebrows in Ford’s board room, if the executives ever bothered to watch it. Against a soft pink background, a young man in light blue shirt and pants polishes the chromium of his custom hot-rod with a huge pink powder puff, all while the Paris Sisters sing their haunting, gender-reassigned version of Bobby Darin’s ‘Dream Lover’ on the soundtrack. The film is brilliant because it works as a completely innocent “boy-and-his-car” love poem, but it is also legendary for its pronounced homoerotic undercurrent. Despite the fact that the actor on screen never talks, disrobes or interacts with anyone else, somehow Anger transfers his ironic, predatory eye, through the camera lens, into the viewer. We feel not so much Anger’s sexual interest in the actor, but his pleasure in the man’s tender adoration of the vehicle. The leisurely dolly shots that comprise the film are a noticeable contrast to Anger’s rapid, dissociative cutting in his more famous films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Scorpio Rising (1964), a style that unfortunately he never resumed.
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